Click – Movie Review

If you can accept Shreyas Talpade as a womanizing glamorous photographer who clicks with the ladies, so to speak, and Sneha Ullal, then the underlining theme of love-on-the-prowl in afterlife is chilling in spurts.

Director Sangeeth Sivan, who had earlier carved a comic slant for himself with “Kyaa Kool Hain Hum”, displays a penchant for projecting a mood of ominous foreboding into the finely lit frames.

The camera (T. Ramji) is impeccably mood-oriented. The idyllic Goa outdoors and the neat spacious artistically designed interiors are used intelligently to create a sense of horrific disorder under the commodious elegant surfaces.

Sandeep Chowta’s reined-in background score is another asset to the mood of underlying foreboding, though the songs, done as annoying set pieces with autopilot choreography, are like molar surgery in the middle of a trying day.

If only portions of the plot was not so hard to digest. Moving on an age-old premise for horror cinema where the protagonist’s past trespasses catch up with him in chilling infinity, “Click” creates a melange of intended terror and unintended humour.

The feeling of something-out-there is well-developed. But the gruesome pre-denouement gang rape and murder are not just out of place but done with unpardonable half-heartedness.

Some of the hero’s trysts with the spook, such as the sequence where he climbs down a fire escape with the spirit in hot pursuit, are spine-chilling. The dying moments where Avi’s past guilt literally rides on his shoulder and apparently for the rest of his life, are a terrifying representation of guilt, though the rest of the film is too flighty to carry the existential burden.

While Shreyas is effective in the traumatized moments, his two co-stars are listless. Blessedly this shiver giver seems original.

And we can’t fault the film for cracking the horror genre with a basic amount of finesse.